Making org-journal more like Day One

Table of Contents

I sometimes think having only one journal would be ideal, but that’s not likely to happen. I know me, and I’ll never stick with just one.

Currently, my primary (non-paper) journals are kept in Day One and Org
Mode.

Day One is a pleasure to use. It looks great and makes journaling quick and easy
on every platform I use. It automatically adds location and weather data to each
entry, which is a nice bonus. The printed books from Day One are also great.

In Org Mode I use org-journal. I like writing in
Emacs/Org-mode and I like plain text and I like Org-mode’s flexible export
options. Basically, for writing things down, I generally prefer to do it in
Org-mode.

I’m trying to level the playing field between Day One and Org Mode. To this end, I’ve added a couple of tweaks to my org-journal.

First, I’ve made it easier to drag and drop images into entries. To do this, I
used a bit of code from John
Kitchin. Still not as easy as Day One, but better than it was.

Next, I added a quick way to insert the current weather conditions into an
entry. This is done using wu, a command-line
interface to Weather Underground. Wrap the
command in a SRC block and
org-babel renders the results
right in the entry.

1
2
3

#+BEGIN_SRC sh :results value verbatim
wu
#+END_SRC

I just put the cursor on the BEGIN_SRC line and hit CTRL-C CTRL-C. Neat.

I could probably find a good way to have the SRC block automatically created
with new entries, but for now, I just use a TextExpander snippet. Close enough.